Does me no good at all. I bought a lifetime membership... and I just don't play. My loss. But I prefer CoH. My gain.

1) CO doesn't have a Mac version. 2) It doesn't seem possible, but - despite the ballyhoo - the world there seems no bigger than CoH. It's just they use teleportal variants (heliocopter) to put in terrains that didn't have to be explained by a Rikti invasion in one single city. The subareas may be more seamlessly linked in CO than CoX, but I'm not convinced that the actually "action areas" aren't about the same. 3) The missions seem, if anything, more repetitious than CoH's. (Mission Architect has taught me that, for many such games, a mission is all in the text it's wrapped in: the parameters for actually building a mission are very limiting. I was rather thrilled that at least one recent non-MA CoH mission actually tried to make you feel like you entered a building, exited it to a street confrontation, and then headed on down into the sewers. With appropriate text for why you were doing that -- without them being 3 separate missions in an arc. The Devs in CoH may be learning from player innovations - something no other game has.) 4) The one innovation CO has - "design your own Nemesis" - has not, in my limited experience, really affected any of my gameplay. Making it kindof an expected disappointment. I didn't really think they'd figured out how to make truly unique Nemesis encounters for each Player. You may be better off asking a friend to build a Nemesis mission in MA in CoH for a real challenge... even if it won't jump out at you unexpectedly when you're fighting some other group of baddies. 5) The design for characters where all characters take basically the same powers dressed up in different special effects just bums me out. I'm not a min-maxer, but even trying to do a Concept-designed character is difficult and often unplayable. You can make an unplayable character in CoH, but most of the time almost any CoH character can find a home and a use somewhere. Which makes CoH a much more rp-friendly environment.

I hate the character art style-I far prefer the art style in CoH (and ironically, STO, which is also a Cryptic production). That's one of the big stumbling blocks for me with it.

They do tend to have one continuous city as opposed to a fragmented city, and get around the instance issues with making those instances far off locations (desert, Canada); if there is a "city section" that is instanced, well, it must be at the rarefied levels I never reached.

I'm not a fan of how they did the "Silver Accounts"-the free ones-and what it does to characters you choose to convert to that account if you'd previously paid a sub. Guarantees the characters I had played for a short time will never see the light of day again. I can see why they did it that way, but that doesn't mean I like it.

I like having people running up to your hero to ask for help; until the tips hit CoH, we didn't have anything comparable. The Nemesis system had the advantage of using your designed villain in missions you didn't script yourself, so there's that element of "what is he/she up to now?" Sure, you can do that kind of thing in MA, but it doesn't have the spontenaeity to it; if they could have radio or tip missions in CoH that replaced the boss with your "nemesis" sometimes, that would definitely be a strong way to go in the game. I don't actually see that happening anytime soon, sadly.

Fun fact for lifetimers: you do get a monthly "stipend" of x number of points for their store, so you're still getting something for nothing; subbers get that too, but obviously, they're paying 15 a month for that stipend. Equally obviously, means nothing if you're not planning to ever go back in the game, but still.

The apparent success of this move for Cryptic will undoubtedly mean that they'll be lustfully eyeing STO next, where I have my lifetimer sub; if it's treated anything like CO, I can live with it. (As of July, my lifetime hits maturity, so to speak, so it's all gravy from there.)

I don't think CO was EVER looked at-even by their devs-as a WoW killer; they certainly DID expect it to be a CoH killer, though. I think the result of that battle is apparent by now, don't you?

Utlimately, while again, I don't think CO is a bad game-there's stuff over there I'd dearly love to have seen in CoH (throwing trucks with super strength! Wooo!)-but I still see CoH as a superior game. That's why I'm still here; that's why I'm likely to remain here. Only thing I can think of that could pry me loose would be a CoH 2; and honestly, it'd have to be something really sweet (and yet still be friendly to my PC specs) to do it.

Even though I'm not playing right now, I wanted to look into the free play aspect. It's very similar to LotRO (Lord of the Rings Online), D&D Online, and others. Basically you can play, but you're limited in so many ways it's like starting fresh in CoH and play through Atlas, Kings Row, and maybe another zone, being limited to a couple of characters, and never getting any of the perks. You can still pay your membership fee and get the entire game for free though.

Simply put, it's a marketing strategy to make money. The reason this works (and I have some idiot friends that do this), you get your account free, then you can earn points to unlock things in the online store. But most things are cheap, like 99cents or 2.49 for something big. You buy a few things here and there, like unlocking a zone, getting a few costume pieces, etc. then before you know it you're spending more for your free game than if you got everything by paying the monthly fee. At least that's what happens in over 20 FTP games I've looked into. Not completely sure how much CO has gone into that yet, but by what I saw they have the same scheme.

Either way I agree with Libby - if you've gone FtP already and you aren't that big of a game anyway, it's not good.